To the best of my knowledge, there is no recipe on the forum for the Pizza Hut Thin 'N Crispy dough.

Pizza Hut has largely gone to frozen dough for its pizzas in the U.S. I don't know if this is true for the Thin 'N Crispy doughs, so it is possibe that the crusts for the Thin 'N Crispy pizzas, quite likely par-baked, are made for them by one or more third parties.

PH seems to have stopped publishing their ingredients lists for their pizzas, but in 2008 there were two versions of ingredients lists for the thin and crispy pizzas that they sold at that time, to wit:

I am pretty sure that the second version is no longer being used because, as shown at http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fats-and-oils/7954/2, partially hydrogenated fat (basically shortening) contains trans fats. PH does publish Nutrition information for its products, and if you look at the Nutrition Facts for its Thin 'N Crispy pizzas, at http://www.pizzahut.com/nutritionpizza.html, you will see that there are no trans fats in that product. That means that they are using oils, most likely soybean oil. Since the second ingredients list above has salt listed ahead of the yeast, that can mean that the dough was frozen.

It's quite possible that the crusts used by PH for its Thin 'N Crispy pizzas are par-baked and frozen until used, after defrosting, to fill orders. If so, if you purchase a simple cheese pizza you might be able to weigh the pizza and also get a rough idea as to the amount of pizza cheese and sauce used on that pizza.

The dough ingredients given in the above lists are in the order of predominance by weight. That means that there will be more flour by weight than water, more water by weight than oil, etc. That might help you construct a dough recipe to use.

Peter;You are correct in the order of dominance for the ingredients, with a single caveat, the 2% rule. This states that once an ingredients is at or below the 2% level it no longer need to be shown in the order of predominance. With a lot of baked items you can use salt as a marker, that is; salt is typically used at about the 2% level, so for any ingredients listed before the salt, it's a good bet that it will be used above the 2% level. In pizza though, salt is rarely used at that high of a level due to all of the other salt contributions, so my feeling is that oil might be a better indicator for the 2% level. Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

Peter;You are correct in the order of dominance for the ingredients, with a single caveat, the 2% rule. This states that once an ingredients is at or below the 2% level it no longer need to be shown in the order of predominance. With a lot of baked items you can use salt as a marker, that is; salt is typically used at about the 2% level, so for any ingredients listed before the salt, it's a good bet that it will be used above the 2% level. In pizza though, salt is rarely used at that high of a level due to all of the other salt contributions, so my feeling is that oil might be a better indicator for the 2% level. Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

Tom,

Thanks for adding that. I copied the two ingredients lists in my last post from Pizza Hut pdf documents. Fortunately, they did not use the 2% rule for the Thin 'N Crispy dough. I hate that rule because it makes it a lot harder, at least for me, to try to reverse engineer or clone the product in question, even with Nutrition Facts.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no recipe on the forum for the Pizza Hut Thin 'N Crispy dough.

Peter

The type of information you went on to give scribble in that post.......does this possibly mean that you are up for giving the long elusive PH Thin an Crispy a go at cloning?I have played around with it quite a bit myself in the past and would be more than happy(along with a number of others I'm sure)to assist in making this happen.Thanks for your consideration.Bob

Is there any recipe that would give something similiar. I am open to other suggestions since I either make a traditional style from what is supposed to be a cracker crust or my cracker crust turns out almost inedable.

Is there any recipe that would give something similiar. I am open to other suggestions since I either make a traditional style from what is supposed to be a cracker crust or my cracker crust turns out almost inedable.

scribble,Let's give this enough time for our overtaxed moderator ...Pete-zza to consider this subject matter.I can help you get close....but let's see if we can get bonafied, kay?

The type of information you went on to give scribble in that post.......does this possibly mean that you are up for giving the long elusive PH Thin an Crispy a go at cloning?I have played around with it quite a bit myself in the past and would be more than happy(along with a number of others I'm sure)to assist in making this happen.

Bob,

No, it is unlikely that I will be attempting to reverse engineer and clone the PH Thin 'N Crispy dough. It was out of curiosity that I dug into the matter to the extent that I did. As you know from the Mellow Mushroom, NJ Boardwalk, Papa John's, Papa Gino's and Buddy's/Two Bill's clone threads, just to name a few in which I was intimately involved, it can take weeks and even months and sometimes even longer to reverse engineer and clone a popular dough recipe, and there may even be some out of pocket expenses for the people who do all of the work that never get reimbursed (Norma is a very good example of this). The problem is is that when the job is done and the recipe is finally posted, the ones who benefit the most are the ones who least deserve it. I don't mean the loyal members on the forum, and certainly not the members who participate in such projects. I am talking about the people who go to Google, search on expressions like "Papa John's clone" or "Papa John's copycat recipe", find this forum as a result of the search, register in order to be able to search, find and copy the recipe, and then leave, usually never to return again except possibly to find another clone recipe. There is rarely ever a simple "thank you", or any feedback on the recipe (although some come back for more help), they do not stay and become regulars, and certainly they make no donations to the forum as a way of saying "thank you".

I'm sure that a lot of the above is innocent behavior since we all search the Internet looking for recipes. However, I have always viewed reverse engineering and cloning someone else's recipe as a special and unique case. It is the hardest thing I know to do and if I am going to give it up I want there to be a tangible benefit to the forum. I don't want thousands of members registering on the forum looking only for clone recipes and little else.

Is there any recipe that would give something similiar. I am open to other suggestions since I either make a traditional style from what is supposed to be a cracker crust or my cracker crust turns out almost inedable.

scribble,

I have never had a PH Thin 'N Crispy pizza so let me spend a little bit more time on this matter to see if I can identify something already on the forum that looks like it might be of interest to you.

Peter I appreciate all your help in this matter. I extremely enjoy cooking at home and just recently got into baking and pizza dough making. I really want to learn as much as I can so I can come up with new things on my own and don't have to rely on someone elses work. I think my big fault is not understanding the whole HYDRATION thing I hear everyone talking about and I don't understand. I have maid 2 other crusts, one is a whole wheat honey that turned out good, I am not sure what type of pizza it would fit into as I have never really delt with classifying my pizza other than deep dish. The other was a whole wheat recipe from Bobby Dean's Not My Mamma's Meals show that was supposed to be a tin crust but I must have done something wrong as it turned out like my other whole wheat ones. I also hear about window pain but I am not sure what that means.

I have so many pizza's in my head I would like to build but I don't really understand what I am doing so that isn't making things any better.

scribble,There was a gentleman on the forum here several months ago who is the Head Chef for Pizza Inn. He provided us a thin crust pizza recipe that I think would be fun for us to try. Let me do a little digging around an I'll get back to you.Bob

I called a couple of local Pizza Huts and was told that the dough skins for the Thin 'N Crispy pizzas are delivered to their stores (that is, not made in-house) and they are not par-baked. That means that they come into the stores frozen and are defrosted before using to fulfill orders. That leads me to believe that PH is using something like the first ingredients list I posted, but because the PH Nutrition Facts show a lot of Sugars in the Thin 'N Crispy pizzas, I am led to believe that there is sugar also used in the dough and that is not indicated in the 2008 ingredients list I provided. I thought perhaps there was a lot of sugar in the sauce but I was told that they use their regular sauce for the Thin 'N Crispy pizzas, not the sweet one. There may be some Sugars in the cheese blend that PH uses, which quite likely is supplied by Leprino Foods, but there is no way of knowing what the Sugars amount to without seeing the Nutrition Facts for the cheese blend, which Leprino does not disclose publicly.

On the matter of hydration of a dough, that is a technical term that relates to the amount of water used to make the dough. It is calculated by taking the weight of water in the recipe and dividing that value by the weight of flour in the recipe.

For now, I wouldn't worry about windowpaning of the dough. That applies more to more highly hydrated doughs that are used to make skins that are shaped and stretched and tossed by hand.

Perfect Peter...thanks so much!And yes, that linked directly to the recipe I had in mind.

I know that Pizza Inn thin crust is a little different than PH's but I am hoping that aawshads recipe(done without a par baked crust) just might be something very close to an old school PH T&C. We'll see....

Perfect Peter...thanks so much!And yes, that linked directly to the recipe I had in mind.

I know that Pizza Inn thin crust is a little different than PH's but I am hoping that aawshads recipe(done without a par baked crust) just might be something very close to an old school PH T&C. We'll see....

Yep, thanks...I noticed that. For my oven and pan setup I have a pretty good grasp on amounts of sugar to use in these pizzas.The oil part is what gets tricky(for me) to dial in the crisp/tenderness contrast. Usually takes a few TF trials to get the combo right.I like experimenting with this style....Bob

I believe I figured out where all of the Sugars come from in the PH Thin 'N Crispy pizzas. To give you an idea of what I am talking about, according to the PH Nutrition Facts for a 12" Thin 'N Crispy cheese pizza (the easiest pizza to analyze), by my calculation there are 30.4-33.6 grams of Sugars in that pizza. If those Sugars were all table sugar (sucrose), we would be talking about 7.6-8.4 teaspoons of sugar. Of course, that would mean a very sweet pizza. It would be inedibly sweet. But, under FDA regulation, Sugars has a broader meaning than table sugar. Under FDA regulations, Sugars are defined as "the sum of all free mono- and disaccharides (such as glucose, fructose, lactose and sucrose)". In our case, I am pretty certain the the bulk of the Sugars comes from the cheese blend that PH uses on its pizzas. I have looked at PH ingredients over the years and there has not been a great number of changes in the composition of the cheese blends that PH has used. I am pretty certain that the supplier of the cheese blend to PH is Leprino Foods. The most recent ingredients list that I have found for the PH cheese blend is in this November, 2011 article: http://www.livestrong.com/article/550990-what-is-the-difference-between-pizza-hut-mozzarella-cheese-and-regular-mozzarella/. The ingredients listed in that article are "pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, modified food starch, whey protein concentrate, nonfat milk and sodium propionate". Those are the same ingredients as set forth in the 2008 pdf PH ingredients document that I referenced earlier. And the pasteurized cheese means part-skim mozzarella cheese.

Great info as always Peter, thank you.Yes, even at only .5% sugar I had noticed that Nick had more than enough browning going on and I really think this pizza's flavor profile does not benefit from sweetness so your observation is keen and quite applicable here, thanks.I'm concerned/interested in the cheese selection. You have indicated part skim. It's no secret that people favor the old (70's) PH T&C. That pizza had a slight bit of pull...stringiness to it's cheese so I am thinking maybe try a blend of WM and PS. What blend ratio would you recommend(or other suggestion). Using today's cheeses, will I be able to cook this 'lil thin thing hot enough to get some "bite" out of the cheese without throwing everything else off kilter?Thanks!Bob

Using today's cheeses, will I be able to cook this 'lil thin thing hot enough to get some "bite" out of the cheese without throwing everything else off kilter?

Bob,

I am not sure what kinds of problems you have in mind but when I made cracker style pizzas, my preferred practice was to use a cutter pan (although I did try direct baking on a stone) and, after pre-baking the crust, I put the cheese (in slices or shredded or diced) directly on the crust and then followed with the sauce and toppings. Putting the cheese down first was an idea that I got from Tom Lehmann. I believe I saw the idea at http://www.pmq.com/Recipe-Bank/index.php/name/Chicago-Cracker-Style-Pizza-Crust/record/57734/. I think putting the cheese down first helped keep the sauce and any liquids from wet toppings from migrating into the crust and reducing or impairing its crispiness. The cheeses were also protected from excessive browning or breaking down during the prolonged bake time following the dressing of the pizzas after the par-bake.

I don't know what sequence PH uses to assemble its pizzas and how it bakes them but I would imagine that the pizzas are baked on screens in conveyor ovens.